Gordon Cooper: Revisited

JimOberg

meaningless333
There´s also the letter that Gordon Cooper sent to Grenada embassador at the United Nations (1978).

Yes, and other sincere stories that he has told.

But the question I'm raising doesn't deal with his stories. It's to ask why, for decade after decade, the UFO community not only didn't WANT to look for verification, they seemed to actively want to NOT know of any problems with his stories that were -- and ARE -- too useful for public relations purposes? So to avoid the risk of the run-of-the-mill misperception rate [>>90%], do NOT take the chance of discovering anything inconvenient.

Is that REALLY the attitude that authentic investigators can use successfully?

You can fight forever against almost anything by questioning the witnesses' ability to see what they are looking at. If this kind of argument was pushed to the limits all kinds of criminals, in court, could go free because the witness, arguably, might have gone goggle-eyed at the critical moment. What you need to do is look at the number of astronauts and pilots who see these things and ask if they could all be making mistakes. To argue they are is saying the Air Force has a bunch of prematurely geriatric nincompoops defending the country. It just doesn't add up to a convincing hypothesis. And then you have to get all the non Air Force sightings and dismiss them on the same basis. Look at it this way. There are two possibilities-

1. There are real ufos. This being the case it is likely that people are seeing what they are looking at and reporting it accurately.

2. There are no ufos. This means there is some kind of mass pathology going on since the 50s and before and it is gathering momentum. Is it likely that thousands of otherwise normal people could have a selective pathology pertaining only to the perception of ufos and are otherwise perfectly normal and function properly otherwise?

You need to get into a higher gear with this. The Alternative Hypothesis does not work because its implications - if you think carefully about them - are absurd and it is harder to believe than the ufo explanation.

EnPassant
...You need to get into a higher gear with this. The Alternative Hypothesis does not work because its implications - if you think carefully about them - are absurd and it is harder to believe than the ufo explanation

You are arguing that the actual data should not be looked at too closely, but only en masse.

So even -- hypothetically -- granted that some UFO reports represent a truly unexplainable phenomenon, you are arguing that ALL UFO reports must therefore be accepted fully at face value? No, I don't think that's what you mean.

So then let's unhypotheticalize ourselves and do the only real investigation that's within our means: check testimony, doublecheck other witnesses and records.

You do seem to be saying that in Cooper's special case, we should avoid doing that and reporting results?

You prefer the public to be kept in the dark about any issues discovered in this process? You argue that they can't handle the whole truth, and need to be fed only snippets of partial truth?

If you could, would you delete my website?

Any by the way, in all the literature of astronauts witnessing UFOs on space missions, which of the reports has stood up to independent investigation, do you think?

Specifically regarding Cooper's stated views on the subject, what does he say about his own and his astronaut colleagues [Mercury, Gemini, Apollo] experiencing such phenomena on space flights? What is his assessment of such reports?

Ectoplasm8
Cooper: "I chased one, one time in an airplane. Boy it looked like a big saucer really high and I had an afterburner going and got as high as I could in this airplane. As I started pulling up close to it, I had a very shame-faced look on my face when I realized it was a big weather balloon with the radio pack hanging under it."

Sensationalized TV programs like this do nothing constructive to help this phenomena. They only perpetuate myths. I believe this show did the same type of thing with JAL 1628. Editing the story and leaving out facts.

The vid would not work but did he see the weather balloon after his ufo sighting? I know if I saw a flying saucer I'd be on the lookout for more and I'd probably, temporarily, imagine something in the distance might be a ufo. That's a natural response.

Also, he did identify it as a weather balloon so he is honest with himself. You can interpret the facts from different points of view here...

reply to post by JimOberg


Data and individual cases are important and they should be examined and criticized but at this stage there is such a preponderance of evidence that it is now possible to form hypothesis - so much data has been collected. One can endlessly question the data of an individual case in terms of anomalous perception but when you are dealing with thousands of witnesses describing much the same thing the investigation automatically goes into a new level.

For example, the question can now be asked "Why are they seeing the same thing all the time? And why do independent witnesses describe the same details (eg 'falling leaf' motion)?" And so on. My point is that when data goes beyond a critical mass the whole argument takes on new dimensions because you can now take an overview of a phenomena as opposed to a single case or a few cases.

More so, when convincing hypothesis are formed concerning the phenomena, the results of these investigations can influence the reassessment of individual cases. For example, one case refers to 'falling leaf motion'. Wha?

But after a time it is found that 100 cases refer to falling leaf motion - so maybe the first case reporting falling leaf motion is not so weird at all? So you gotta get to the top floor and then go down again and reassess.

EnPassant

JimOberg
In July 1960 Cooper was interviewed by Yvonne S. Durfield and had this to say about UFO's. "I don't take UFO's seriously. I would be very skeptical."

They got to him

It's possible. He decided to lie in order to keep his job as an astronaut.

On the other hand, it might represent one point in his evolution of views on the subject.

We saw [above] his discussion of being tricked once by chasing what turned out to be weather balloons. That comment is highly interesting when compared with a comment he made to a NICAP official in the early 1970s -- he had chased UFOs once in Germany, that turned out to be weather balloons. Later, his story transformed into spotting UFOs, even while every other member of his unit I was able to track down -- about ten -- had no recollection of UFO chases, while one recalled a chase that he suspected involved Soviet jets on a probing overflight [in 1951, Soviet jets flew higher and faster than the American ones].

The same process of amplification and narrative centrification can be seen, year by year, in the accounts of the 1957 Edwards AFB story. In 1978, for OMNI magazine, he just 'heard about it' second hand. but by the mid-1990s he was in charge of the photographers and held the film in his own hands.

It's an interesting process worthy of serious historical study, in my view.

ADD: My log entry of the NICAP comment:

www.jamesoberg.com...

Cooper's original Germany 'UFO story' -- Weather balloons
March 5, 1976: Acuff [Jack Acuff, NICAP Director] tells me: "I talked to Cooper several years ago. He is into weird stuff, but he said he hadn't seen any UFOs on his space flights.... he did talk about a UFO in Germany that he chased and then decided was a weather balloon."

reply to post by JimOberg


Ok I must give you credit here for getting at the facts, which are important. If the weather balloon incident and the incident in Germany are the same (I couldn't get the video to work so I did not get this point) then that raises serious questions. But I am suspicious. What pilot would see an object, suspect it was a flying saucer, confirm that it is actually a weather balloon and then go around telling people his mistake? It is not exactly a career enhancing thing to do - to undermine people's estimation of your observational abilities as a pilot or as a credible person. If I saw a flying saucer-cum-weather balloon I'd keep it to myself. I would not go around advertising my mistake. Therefore-

Hypothesis: He saw a flying saucer and reported it. But 'They' told him to cover it with a weather balloon story???

reply to post by JimOberg


Thank you for providing the links. I went through them and it was very interesting. Thank you for taking the time to compile, write, and share the information here.

JimOberg

So then let's unhypotheticalize ourselves and do the only real investigation that's within our means: check testimony, doublecheck other witnesses and records.

Well said. Except 99% of the material was about attacking his character and not the event. It's understandable I suppose if the goal is to win people over. It would be great if, as a society, we did this investigating without bias applied equally across the board of claims. It is a tangled web after all...

After reading the material your presented I still found him to be credible. Actually there were elements in some of your material that reinforced that notion for me. You illustrated several of his faults but honesty didn't appear to be one of them. In fact, he was probably too honest to have succeeded. That combined with poor judgement in friends and a general lack of business acumen created serious road blocks for him.

Thank you again for sharing .

compressedFusion

.... Except 99% of the material was about attacking his character and not the event. It's understandable I suppose if the goal is to win people over. It would be great if, as a society, we did this investigating without bias applied equally across the board of claims. It is a tangled web after all...

After reading the material your presented I still found him to be credible. Actually there were elements in some of your material that reinforced that notion for me. You illustrated several of his faults but honesty didn't appear to be one of them. In fact, he was probably too honest to have succeeded. That combined with poor judgement in friends and a general lack of business acumen created serious road blocks for him.

Thank you again for sharing

.

We seem to be in agreement that no intentional, overt dishonesty is involved.

How you can categorize my research as entirely an attack on his character baffles me, but perhaps it is a defensive reflex against facts that you don't want to know about.

What interests me is how a man like we agree Cooper was, can sincerely issue narratives that appear to diverge farther and farther, with passage of time, from his original stories and those of other witnesses.

Since so much ufological research relies on other witnesses giving equally sincere stories, determining how to calibrate the authenticity of the narratives in relation to original events seems, to me, to be highly important. But as this discussion indicates, that view doesn't seem widely shared.

The fallback position seems to be this: just assume all such testimony is accurate.

Here's one of the still-open mysteries of Cooper's UFO views -- the "Ferrando Tapes". After several years of fruitless quest for the origin of the claim, I was ready to declare the tape transcript entirely bogus.

______beforeitsnews/paranormal/2013/04/astronaut-ufo-sightings-2450366.html

But I finally found one site that described how the quotations are actually translated from a 1973 FRENCH newspaper article. It was supposed to be from an interview at a NYC UFO conference.

Of course, the interview was originally in English, translated by Ferrando into French, and then by another person BACK into English.

I've been searching for ANY other US press or newsletter reports of Cooper at any 1973 UFO conference in New York.

Can anybody help? Ferrando's sound man, now in his 80's, seems to be still living in a rural setting north of NYC. My attempts to contact him are on-going, tantalizing, but so far all failures.

The importance of this earliest-ever public statement by Cooper on UFOs is very high. It suggests that the meme about a UFO landing and leaving ground markings, later transferred to the Edwards event, originated in Florida. But the original English-language comments are critically needed.

EnPassant
The vid would not work but did he see the weather balloon after his ufo sighting? I know if I saw a flying saucer I'd be on the lookout for more and I'd probably, temporarily, imagine something in the distance might be a ufo. That's a natural response.

Also, he did identify it as a weather balloon so he is honest with himself. You can interpret the facts from different points of view here...

I don't know, I think it was before "his" Edwards incident. Doesn't really matter because the point being, he had already formed an opinion: "Boy, it looked like a big saucer really high" before actually getting close enough to identify it. It shows he had a predisposition to believing in 'flying' saucers. With his other encounter, he wasn't able to get close enough to identify what they were. But, it still goes down as a UFO incident. Just as this one would have if he wasn't able to get close enough to identify it.

I can't embed the YouTube video for some reason, so here's the link:
Link

reply to post by JimOberg


I apologize for being overly harsh. I truly appreciate your experience and input.

It seemed like your intent was to establish three basic points:

1.) He had a habit of misidentifying objects because we are all predisposed to the problem presented by our senses.
2.) He had a history of embellishing stories
3.) He may have been a respected astronaut but that doesn't make him right because he has his flaws just like the rest of us. His failed business was an example.

People believe him because of his position and the corresponding impeccable character implied by that position. This is especially true during the Apollo era where they were elevated to the status of heroes. Each of your points bring him down to the role of a normal fallible guy in the public eye. Personally, I'm fine with that and I enjoyed reading your material. I recognize that we are all just normal fallible people. However, the fight really seems to be about public opinion. The problem is likely neither deterministic nor computable. You either believe the guy or you don't and his character is the only knob to turn.

For what it's worth, I have no interest in believing or disbelieving Cooper. I'm not sure what I think about the ET hypothesis and UFOs. This is due, in large part, to the fact that such things have never affected my life. I've only seen stars, planets, satellites, and planes in the sky. However, I still find him to be a credible witness.

JimOberg
Further to my suggestion to compare the two versions of the May 3, 1957, Edwards AFB UFO sighting, here is James McDonald's description of it, as reported in 1968.
www.ufoevidence.org...
page 44, case 41, Edwards afb, may 3, 1957.

Thank you for posting this link!! The entire paper is an amazing read!! It certainly implies a high degree of credibility in James MacDonald's research and opinions on the likelihood of extraterrestrials as the source of a great many sightings back in those days...

To everyone on this thread - I highly recommend reading the report linked above, actually it would be nice if it could maybe have a thread of it's own. I think a lot of ATS members would be interested in reading and discussing it...

compressedFusion
reply to post by JimOberg

 

I apologize for being overly harsh. I truly appreciate your experience and input.

No apology necessary, but gesture is appreciated. You are helping me determine where my statements are subject to easy misinterpretation and thus where they require more clarity and unambiguity. I am sincerely grateful for that help.

It seemed like your intent was to establish three basic points:

1.) He had a habit of misidentifying objects because we are all predisposed to the problem presented by our senses.
2.) He had a history of embellishing stories
3.) He may have been a respected astronaut but that doesn't make him right because he has his flaws just like the rest of us. His failed business was an example.

1. No, I meant to offer no claim regarding his ability to identify objects. My main theme is how he may be a well-documented example where an intelligent man of unquestioned personal integrity can gradually modify his recollections of a UFO-related incident, with no conscious intent to deceive, but perhaps swayed by a noble desire to please or impress a specific type of audience. This seems to be a fairly common human trait in terms of oral history, but it is rarely so well documented as it is in Cooper's case.

2. Yes, but as just said, not to a degree markedly different than anybody else -- just better documented, which makes studying his stories of particular value to UFO studies in general.

3. Absolutely NOT, and I try to keep clarifying this discussion in order to avoid tempting readers into falling into this bizarre mis-reading of my intent. My criticism is aimed at people who, due to his public persona, felt justified in NOT double checking his claims but accepting them at face value. I have explicitly NOT criticized Cooper's own judgment on these deals, please explain how which of my words led you to think it was my intent to do so.

People believe him because of his position and the corresponding impeccable character implied by that position. This is especially true during the Apollo era where they were elevated to the status of heroes. Each of your points bring him down to the role of a normal fallible guy in the public eye. Personally, I'm fine with that and I enjoyed reading your material. I recognize that we are all just normal fallible people. However, the fight really seems to be about public opinion. The problem is likely neither deterministic nor computable. You either believe the guy or you don't and his character is the only knob to turn.

I'm not making myself clear. I have never made any criticisms of his character, I have documented his track record of evolution of stories of that nature, and it is that DOCUMENTED TRACK RECORD that provides guidance to accepting the authenticity of his stories.

For what it's worth, I have no interest in believing or disbelieving Cooper. I'm not sure what I think about the ET hypothesis and UFOs. This is due, in large part, to the fact that such things have never affected my life. I've only seen stars, planets, satellites, and planes in the sky. However, I still find him to be a credible witness.

The issue is bigger than Cooper or his stories, it's how we as amateur ufologists assess the validity of sole-source unverified testimony. I suggest my results indicate that merely performing hand-waving over a witness's character being a valid reliable determinant of testimonial authenticity is not justified.

lostgirl
Thank you for posting this link!! The entire paper is an amazing read!! It certainly implies a high degree of credibility in James MacDonald's research and opinions on the likelihood of extraterrestrials as the source of a great many sightings back in those days...

That could well be true, but was not the application that I used it for here. Assuming McDonald's account of the 1957 Edwards case is reliable [and I have no reason to doubt it], then Cooper's much later embellished description CANNOT be. Do you agree?

McDonald, because of entirely understandable and excusable lack of access to information about some contemporary missile/space activities, did overlook a few prosaic explanations for other cases. But that's beyond the scope of this thread.

Re my attempts to track down the Ferrando tape:

My best lead is this reference to a story "contained in an article which the late Lou Zinsstag translated from the French for me in 1973. Unfortunately, I have neither the name of the paper nor the date, but the article was written by J. L. Ferrando, based on an interview with an astronaut at a congress in New York in mid-1973, tape-recorded by Benny Manocchia. "
www.bibliotecapleyades.net...

Does anybody have proper search tools, and time/inclination. to try to find Benny Manocchia. So far I've struck out.

I made some more effort to track down
BENNY MANOCCHIA and his 1973-era tape of the first-ever Gordon Cooper on-the-record UFO interview.

There was one recent repeat of it, attributed to Manocchia, but in Portuguese, that is essentially the same set of quotes we already have, BUT one additional sentence after the Cooper claim he personally saw a Florida landing site of a 4-legged UFO: "Ed White e James McDivitt Em Junho de 1965, os astronautas Ed White (primeiro Americano a andar no espaço) e James McDivitt estavam passando".

google translate: Ed White and James McDivitt In June 1965 , astronauts Ed White ( first American to walk in space ) and James McDivitt were passing.

I'm interpreting this to mean that Cooper's visit to the UFO landing site was during the June 1965 flight of the two other astronauts.

That's additional information, important information. I sure would like to get the entire transcript, if I can get a hold of Manocchia.

reply to post by JimOberg


1.) Desire to please can be powerful

Thank you for the clarification. I think I assimilated some of your other previous comments I read here on ATS which resulted in a misinterpretation of your point. I read the links in the order you presented them and the overall tone of the first link didn't seem commensurate with your intent. Your summary of point 1 was mostly flattering with a nice dose of reality sprinkled in. I didn't get the same impression from the 1st link (regarding his business failure). Perhaps it was inevitable since his business failure was the main topic of our discussion.

2.) 1 out of 3 isn't bad I guess .

3.)

please explain how which of my words led you to think it was my intent to do so

I went through www.jamesoberg.com/wsj_1997 in detail scrutinizing your language. I was expecting to find a list of at least 10 words. To my surprise I didn't find any. I realized the problem. Oringinally I was upset with the notion of putting an American icon under the lens. It happened as soon as I read the WSJ title "...Trouble Making Business Fly".

After reading it a second time it still seemed like a (minor) attack. I was struggling to find the balance. Each paragraph focused on mistakes he made throughout his career. I left the article wondering "what were his successes?". In particular, your narrative about Dalton Smith was the most troubling to me. I could see where you attempted to make him the villain but, in my opinion, it just made Cooper look even more foolish in the moment you attempted to shift the blame over to Smith. I originally felt like this was intentional and was well executed.

I'm surprised you don't see some elements of an attack against him. I got the impression you had an axe to grind as you were picking apart statements in his book. Is it possible that some of your passion to use Cooper as a cautionary tale for ufologists was integrated into your writing and is partially clouding your opinion of what you have written?

Frankly, I feel hypocritical because I am constantly guilty of picking things apart and generating friction. And I certainly do it far less eloquently than you.

and it is that DOCUMENTED TRACK RECORD that provides guidance to accepting the authenticity of his stories

This is exactly what I would classify under "character". If you do a search on the following terms:

character witness track record

I hope you might see my point. In my opinion, this is precisely the opposite of what we should be investigating for the Edwards AFB incident. Shouldn't it be about what we can establish factually about the event and not drawing conclusions from other aspects of his life? If we have to draw on other events, establish patterns, and create a track record isn't that just a way of using credibility to deny the due diligence required for establishing what happened?

The letter you received is very interesting and so is McDonald's account. However, I wouldn't accept any of it at as fact any more than I would Cooper's stories. I personally wouldn't accept it as fact without a detailed review of the investigation. In the end, neither side can absolutely prove their point without some doubt. I don't buy into Occam's razor. We are left with personal opinion and credibility. So, this is all about his credibility to me.

The fact that he said something at all is enough to pique my interest and lead me down a rabbit hole or cause me to lose 2% of my capital.

I hope my honest feedback is helpful in some way.

Let me look over my writeuip of the WSJ article, you make a good case it is not balanced.

We can't link to the original since it is copyrighted material. However, I can send you a pdf of it for you, to see if there are biases there. Send me a message with the email you want to use.

My use of the Edwards case is not to bring up a 14,345th interesting UFO report, it is to provide a calibration point for Cooper's stories as they relate to original events. The purpose is to try to offer an assessment of how much we can trust the accuracy of other stories of his, for which we have no other source.

Any further thoughts on how Cooper's story of the Edwards 'landing' is impossible to reconcile with all other witnesses and records, and why that may be?

Any thoughts on the validity of Cooper's claim that he saved the shuttle program from a fatal design flaw by relaying a warning from space aliens? It's in his own autobiography.

On another thread, FireMoon has put forward some extraordinary new items of evidence about Cooper's UFO experiences. Let's hope he'll join us here to elaborate on these claims.

www.abovetopsecret.com...